The cost of making changes entirely depends on how expensive the individual changes are to make. That is generally dependent on how many people are needed to do the work to make those changes. Once upon a time, back when all cutscenes were pre-rendered…
Do you have any insight as to why annual sports titles have not gone the Live Service model yet given the fact each year it is mostly minor tweaks and roster changes anyway?
I’ve actually worked on and shipped more than one annual sports title over my career and I want say for the record that the idea that annual sports titles are «mostly minor tweaks and roster changes» is absolutely and categorically false. Annual sports…
Boost player satisfaction with enhanced health monitoring features
NOTE: Certain platforms send error events automatically if enabled, while others require manual sending. To start sending events for FPS, Boot time, and Memory, it is required to upgrade your SDK to Unity 7.8.0 or newer. Every game developer strives to deliver a seamless and optimized gaming experience. To support your efforts, we expanded the capabilities of Health reporting, introducing FPS (frames per second), Memory Usage management, and App Boot Time features. Complementing existing error messages and related charts, our health reporting toolset allows developers to delve deeper into their game’s performance metrics, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately enhance player satisfaction. Our health feature offers robust filtering capabilities, enabling developers to dissect performance metrics by country, build, and device. Such a granular level of analysis empowers developers to identify performance inconsistencies across different platforms and tailor optimizations accordingly. At…
Addendum to cut content: people find remnants of cut content in game files often enough. So/but is there any even rough estimate you could give of cut content that’s dug up versus cut stuff that could never be found?
It’s really hard to say because every project is different. The kind of games that have the least cut content are annual sports titles — they have the most stringent schedules and know exactly what they are committing to with each annual cycle, so they…
Will people play AAA games on mobile?
AAA games are coming to mobile. But will people actually play AAA games on smaller devices? Here’s what we know.
Sent this ask a while ago but I think Tumblr ate it so here it is: In which stage of game development are relationships between characters decided? Asking this because I recently found an old Final Fantasy VII relationship chart and originally some characters were supposed to have completely different bonds compared to the ones they ended up having in the actual game. These seem to be quite important plot points, so I assume that final decisions should be made before creating cutscenes? Or you can change stuff later if devs come up with better ideas?
The importance of the narrative depends primarily on how important the narrative is to the game. For a game like Overwatch, where the core gameplay is team pvp, the narrative is a lot less important and things like relationships are generally prioritiz…
Why companies don’t record “Making Of” for games anymore?
A good rule of thumb when answering questions like «Why don’t companies do X anymore?» is to think about what X will cost them and what X will get them in return. The purpose of doing things is ostensibly to generate value — no one does X without a rea…
Does cut content exist for video games? Not material devs save for later use in dlcs or expansions, but content that was created and for some reason didn’t make it to the final product. Idk like, a boss battle was way too long so a portion of gameplay was cut off or some footage devs felt like removing from certain cutscenes.
Of course cut content exists. On the latest shipped game that I worked on, I was hired for and spent months working on a significant game mode that was eventually cut. Our game mode was playable with a full game loop but the higher-ups decided it wasn’…
You have talked at length at standard optimizations (LoD, not rendering things, deleting cars on a distant highway to avoid memory overflow, etc). What are the weirdest optimization strategies you have seen?
One of my favorites was detecting animated background characters on screen, skipping 80% of their animation updates, and instead interpolating between the animation frames during the missing frame updates. Since they were just auto-looping background c…
Why you should port your mobile game to console or PC
Developing a version of your game for PC or console can help boost sales and reach more players. But is it right for your game?